Germans

The forced resignation of West German parliamentary Speaker Philipp Jenninger shows that the 1933-45 Nazi era in German history still smolders and can erupt in national guilt and anger, analysts agreed Saturday. "It indicates that Germans are still extremely sensitive about what you can say or not say about the Nazi period," commented one Western diplomat with long experience here. "That history is still deeply etched in the German psyche."

As in many a thriller, the helpful stranger in "The German Doctor" turns out to be a monster. In this case, he's no run-of-the-mill sadist but Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death, and he finds prime subjects for experimentation in an Argentine family. The drama by Lucía Puenzo, adapting her novel "Wakolda," is a credible imagining of a brief period in Mengele's South American exile. The what-if conceit is intriguing enough not to be undone by increasingly heavy-handed symbolism.

Michael Verhoeven's film "The Nasty Girl" is Germany's entry in the foreign-language category in this year's Academy Awards. It is an occasionally surrealistic and often very funny account of a teen-aged Fraulein's distinctly unfunny and dangerous attempts to investigate the Nazi years in her hometown.

KCETLink, the struggling parent company of former PBS outlet KCET-TV, has added two more boldface names to its board of directors. Jeffrey Levine is the vice president and head of television for Random House Studio, a film production arm of the well-known book publisher. Dan German is the founder and general partner of Fort Mason Asset Management, a money management firm in San Francisco. BEST TV OF 2013 Lloyd | McNamara The additions bring the total of directors at KCET to 21. That includes Al Jerome, KCET's longtime chief who recently announced his upcoming retirement.

So much for the U.S. traveler's reputation as the "ugly Americans. " Americans are second only to Germans in the rate at which they leave tips at hotels and restaurants, according to a survey of more than 9,000 travelers in eight countries by the travel website TripAdvisor. QUIZ: How well do you know fast food? When asked how likely they are to tip, 69% of Germans say they always tip, compared with 57% of Americans, 53% of Russians, 40% of Brazilians and 39% of French and British.

German and French officials have discussed plans for a radical overhaul of the European Union that would involve setting up a more integrated and potentially smaller euro zone, EU sources say. “France and Germany have had intense consultations on this issue over the last months, at all levels,” a senior EU official in Brussels told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions. “We need to move very cautiously, but the truth is that we need to establish exactly the list of those who don't want to be part of the club and those who simply cannot be part,” the official said.

Frank Englmann used a personal story about his grandfather to make his point to a local bank bigwig about German reluctance to risk the inflation that might come with the kind of carefree spending advocated by the Obama administration. It was 1922, and Englmann's grandfather had amassed a small fortune that he wanted to spend on a house. But his wife persuaded him to save the money for their daughters' educations. Then the German economy collapsed, the money became worthless and the family penniless.

Unemployed mom Fee Linker lives on welfare benefits in a centrally located five-room flat that costs about $1,500 a month. The garden terrace looks out onto a lush wooded area where birds chirp in the trees. "I wouldn't get along without this government money, not with this apartment," says Linker, who sends her 6-year-old daughter and two sons, 7 and 10, to a private school. "It's my opinion that as a mother of three, I deserve a comfortable life." These days, fewer politicians and economist agree, and if proposed laws are enacted, Linker's benefits could be gone with the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen. The German government is contemplating spending cuts and tax increases totaling $100 billion by 2014.

Erich Honecker may be dancing in his grave. The stodgy Communist Party apparatchik vilified in history as the last leader of the dying East Germany would be proud to know that his political heirs are making a comeback. Germans watching their economic prospects founder, banks getting bailed out by the billions of euros and workers turned out into the streets are taking out their fury by voting in unprecedented numbers for the party called the Left, whose ranks include ideological descendants of Honecker.

BERLIN - My husband, Alan, and I were on our way from L.A. to Budapest, Hungary - our first trip to Eastern Europe. We had to change planes somewhere, and that somewhere happened to be Berlin, a frequent hub for travel to Northern and Eastern European destinations. We had heard that Berlin was an up-and-coming artists' community, often compared with L.A. Instead of sentencing ourselves to a long layover at the airport, we decided to spend a long weekend in Berlin. We expected three days of prowling contemporary art galleries mixed with sobering visits to historical sites (the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a glimpse of where the Berlin Wall once stood)

Say hello to Robin Seggelmann. The name may not ring a bell, but his handiwork has gained worldwide notoriety. Seggelman, it seems, is the poor soul who wrote the flawed piece of code that has come to be known as the Heartbleed bug. According to his profile on the LinuxTag conference website, Seggelmann is a " researcher for the transport protocols of the Internet. Occasionally his work find its way into standards of the Internet Engineering Taskorce (IETF). In a manner of speaking he helps writing the technical 'laws' of the Internet.

Juergen Klinsmann hasn't made many missteps in his 2 1/2 years of coach of the U.S. national team. Still it was hard not to question last week's decision to jettison Martin Vasquez, his longtime right-hand man, and replace him with Tab Ramos and former German national team coach Berti Vogts. Sacking your top assistant two months before the World Cup is a little like a presidential candidate dumping his running mate after the convention. So was it an act of panic or prescience? It's too early to tell.

Authorities on Thursday called off the search for a mountain lion that killed a 100-pound German shepherd in Fontana after an “exhaustive” 24 hours. “We believe the contact our officers had with the mountain lion [Wednesday] scared it back into the canyon," Fontana Police Chief Rodney Jones said in a statement. Officers responding to the incident shortly after 3:30 a.m. Wednesday initially scared off the large cat from a home's front yard after firing multiple rounds. B ut it returned four times, coming toward officers before returning to the gorge, according to police.

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that she was merely comparing the tactics used by Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin - and not equating the men themselves - when she drew a parallel between Hitler's efforts to resettle Germans in the late 1930s to Putin's recent moves to issue Russian passports to citizens in Ukraine with ties to Russia. The eyebrow-raising remarks were offered at a private fundraiser in Long Beach on Tuesday. "Now if this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the '30s," Clinton said, according to the Long Beach Press Telegram.

Dismayed at how German authorities have handled a ballyhooed seizure of suspected Nazi-looted art, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor from New York City is suing them for the return of a painting he says was stolen in the late 1930s from his great uncle in Germany. David Toren's suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleges that the Federal Republic of Germany and the Free State of Bavaria have "perpetuate[d] the persecution of Nazi victims" by not expeditiously returning artworks they seized in 2012 from Cornelius Gurlitt, the elderly son of an art expert who was known for acquiring looted art for Adolf Hitler.

An armed man walked into a fast-food restaurant in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and abducted a German woman sitting at a table with her husband, officials said, as a Taliban spokesman declared that talks to free 19 South Korean hostages had failed. The woman and her husband, also a German, have worked in Kabul for the Christian organization Ora International for almost a year, a group spokesman said.

Afghan police freed a German woman in a Kabul neighborhood and arrested a group of kidnappers early today, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. The 31-year-old aid worker was freed during a raid in the western part of the capital not far from the restaurant where she was seized Saturday, Zemary Bashari said. On Sunday, Afghan television broadcast what it said was video of the woman being told to call for the release of unspecified prisoners. On the tape, she said her name was Christina Meier.

Though he's an award-winning director in his own right in Russia, Fedor Bondarchuk had a challenge emerging from the shadow of his famous father, the late Soviet filmmaker and actor Sergei Bondarchuk, who starred in and directed the seven-hour version of "War and Peace," which won the 1969 foreign-language Oscar. Bondarchuk, an actor and TV host, said that the Russian media are always looking for similarities between him and his father, who directed him in the 1986 film "Boris Godunov.

Though it comes to Los Angeles as a two-part film, "Generation War" began its life as a three-part German TV series (originally called "Our Mothers, Our Fathers") that was a sensation in its home country. Eight years in the making, 4 hours, 39 minutes long (and needing two separate admissions during its weeklong run at Landmark's Nuart), "Generation War" attracted millions of viewers on German TV. Its story will be familiar and unfamiliar to American viewers, which is why it holds our interest even when it is not at its best.